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Didn't see this mentioned but apparently the new 2025 Armies on Parade rule says you cannot use parts from AOS/TOW/Blood Bowl (basically any of the fantasy games) on 40k/30k/etc. models (any of the sci-fi games) and vice versa:



Remember when GW encouraged kitbashing instead of this nonsense they do now?

Ouch. I was planning on using some pennants from Warhammer on my Knights.

It's mind-bogglingly ridiculous, even for a backward company like GW.

I understand not plopping down Settra in the middle of a.Necron army, but there is a lot of Tomb Kings stuff that just works when incorporated into the Necrons.

This also kills a lot of Custodes conversions as I know people who use Sigmarites as parts of their Custodes models.

This is quite possibly the most anti-hobbyist thing they could do to this community.

I understand not using 3rd party stuff. But not using cool bits from differing setting GW kits makes about as much sense as pissing into the wind.

Looks like my custom mkiv Noise marines with Hedonite bling are not acceptable...nor are the combat shields for my Firedrakes since they use stormcast ones as a base.

That's really dumb. Is it April 1st?

 JNAProductions wrote:
That's really dumb. Is it April 1st?

It's always April 1st for GW.

This one is wildly stupid. Almost impressively so.

Geez.
Over the last decade or so, GW has been moving steadily toward kits with less optional/extra parts, and now they've halved the number of kits you could pull parts from.

Dumb.

A while ago I mentioned in a thread that GW was hostile to kitbashing and got jumped on for saying so. I wonder where those defenders are now, and what they have to say about this?

Really stupid, but the only thing more stupid than this is letting some corporate fethwipe tell you what to do with your toys.

Doesn't make a lick of sense from a marketing standpoint. Using various bits from several GW settings only helps showcase the diversity of GW's model range.

It feels like no one at GW understands why people play tabletop games instead of (or in addition to) video games.

Damn, I think put some of the severed human heads from the mordor Troll sprue on my Rhino. How could I! Heresy! I'm doomed!

I really want to ask how GW got to this one, like exactly the reason we are getting this specific thing as it seems so strange and specific.

 Apple fox wrote:
I really want to ask how GW got to this one, like exactly the reason we are getting this specific thing as it seems so strange and specific.

Maybe because people were talking about how awful the new Sanguinary Guard were and how they would use Prosecutor wings

One of the White Dawrfers even mixes AoS and 40k for her Custodes.

It's an odd bit that I don't understand. Is Armies on Parade run by a specific entity within GW?

This is in keeping with GW's shift away from being a modelling hobby company to a multimedia company.

The miniatures fulfil a different role in their strategy now and they no longer consider creativity a big part of the product. They have been spoonfeeding their products more and more over the last few decades. This includes shifting the focus around special characters, selling their story, models and faction so you no longer need to be creative. you just buy Jeff and slavishly follow the 'rules' around what Jeff's army looks like.

The uptick of people requesting 'lore accurate' assessments of their stuff is testament to that - 20 years ago it was far less prevalent, people were encouraged to make their doods their doods, even when they're an existing faction. People painting their blood angels how they like and still considering them blood angels.

Now because GW has created LORE RULES through copious bad fiction, there is a CORRECT way to enjoy their ranges of products and a WRONG way.

This just reinforces their segregation of their product ecosystems and tells their customers that they have the engage with the products in the prescribed CORRECT way.

It goes back to them slowly removing customization stuff. No longer do you get to DIY your own chapter like in 4th IIRC, there's fundamentally no difference between Ultramarines and Imperial Fists, Mortifactors and Minotaurs, apart from some of the named ones having special characters. Nothing unique.

I don't know if it's competitive players to blame for crying about picking X chapter and having it be not as good a Y chapter, or what, but it's been a huge step backward.

This is, sadly, the logical expansion of that. Each game is unique and self-contained (which also coincides with rumor that each team is in competition with each other as far as sales go) and never the twain shall meet.

Absolutely ridiculous. It's more ridiculous that GW keeps being rewarded for these braindead decisions.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
One of the White Dawrfers even mixes AoS and 40k for her Custodes.

It's an odd bit that I don't understand. Is Armies on Parade run by a specific entity within GW?

The same people who work at the No Fun League, I'd wager.

This would make my Land Raider a no-go, since I put some scrolls from the Kairic Acolytes kits on there.

Keep in mind, as of right now this is only for armies on parade. It's not like you can't use it in regular games or even tournaments...

The question is going to be, are they going to try and push this for tournaments?

So to be clear up front, I dislike BOTH this limitation and the loss of flexible equipment. I am only posting here because so many people are wondering WHY GW is doing what they do.

So the easy one first: datacards that let you build ONLY what's in the box. For those of us with with large cross-faction and cross=platform collections, this rule absolutely sucks. But do you remember buying your first box of Devastators and thinking "Well, there goes all my hobby money, and I still need to buy three more boxes to build the four lascannon unit that I actually want."

Well, that doesn't happen any more. Most of the people who post here have big collections, leading to huge bits boxes... But by GW's calculus, there are more people turned off by needing multiple boxes to build the optimal unit than there are people turned on by the increased modelling opportunities. And while I personally, along with many (most) of you profoundly disagree with this decision. given their profit margins they may actually be right.

And think about it: in order to achieve optimum volume of sales, in a niche game with few players, policies that encourage (require) you to buy multiple boxes of each product are good. Yes, buy 4 boxes of devastators to get the unit you want, by all means- we need to move this product! Then you pick up two million more players world-wide because of a global pandemic, and now all the sudden you need to make 8 million boxes of devastators so that those two million people can have their optimum unit. And you think: okay, now we need another production facility, a bigger warehous (or three), a more robust mail order service, more power, more materials..."

Now for the hard one- this Armies on Parade platform purity nonsense:

My guess is they don't want to create the perception that people who play both systems or have the money to burn on cross-platform kits for conversion sake are at an advantage in the contest. Such a perception could lead to lower participation.

As I said, I disagree with both of these policies, but I do understand them.

Here's the link if you want to read all the fun:

https://citadelcolour.com/armies-on-parade-frequently-asked-questions/

And more nonsense:

Note that Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game miniatures, scenery, and components (from The Lord of the Rings™, The Hobbit™, Armies of Middle-earth™, and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim™ ranges) must only be used for entries depicting Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game armies.

Any entry found to combine Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game miniatures, scenery, or components with those from other Warhammer game systems may be disqualified.

But my favorite bit is this:

What Do Judges Score By?
The cohesiveness of display theme, originality and creativity, conversion skill, and painting finesse.

While GW have definitely been moving steadily away from encouraging kitbashes and conversions for a while now, I can actually almost see the logic of this one, given that it is specifically referring to Armies on Parade.

If they're using AoP as a showcase of their game ranges, mixing those ranges confuses things. It's much clearer advertising to only have 40K minis in a 40K promotional space.

That said, I still thing it's a poor choice, and is likely to lead to ill-will when it is invariably badly enforced... Yes, it will be obvious when someone shows up with Space Marines riding flying sharks, but then that guy over there using AoS Orc heads on his Ork boys is going to slip through and the squigs will hit the fan.

PenitentJake wrote:

My guess is they don't want to create the perception that people who play both systems or have the money to burn on cross-platform kits for conversion sake are at an advantage in the contest. Such a perception could lead to lower participation.

As I said, I disagree with both of these policies, but I do understand them.

That doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny, though. Armies on Parade features models painted to a pretty high standard, often including lots of extra bits and pieces, some identifiable and some not. I don't think anyone's looking at the entries and costing the individual kits that went into it. It also doesn't make sense because the game system the kit comes from that provides those extra bits isn't relevant if you're tracking the cost of the entries. If a squad cost £200 in kits does it matter if they're all from 40k or there's a couple from AoS instead?

Participation in Armies on Parade is already limited by the high bar for quality. The cost angle is irrelevant and probably never really thought about by anyone.

Lathe Biosas wrote:Here's the link if you want to read all the fun:

https://citadelcolour.com/armies-on-parade-frequently-asked-questions/

And more nonsense:

Note that Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game miniatures, scenery, and components (from The Lord of the Rings™, The Hobbit™, Armies of Middle-earth™, and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim™ ranges) must only be used for entries depicting Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game armies.

Any entry found to combine Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game miniatures, scenery, or components with those from other Warhammer game systems may be disqualified.

This one actually does make sense. The license conditions for the LoTR miniatures and games are very specific about not allowing use in other GW games and vice versa. That's why the scale is different. GW would be in breach of the license conditions if they were thought to be endorsing mixing elements from LoTR and non-LoTR ranges.

Meh AoP is a crock anyway.

We always joked it wasn't Armies on Parade, it was Display Boards on Parade.

My innate contrariness wants to launder parts through the chaos daemons range. Use a bunch of Lumineth or whatever parts to convert a daemonette, that's a Sigmar-Sigmar conversion. Use said daemonette in a 40k game, it's now a 40k miniature. Snip parts off it and attach them to another 40k miniature...

Very bizarre, even more so when you remember that GW still sells Chaos Daemons for both settings simultaneously. Their official model range breaks this rule.

It almost makes me wonder if they wrote the rules wrong and it was only meant to apply to bits unique to each setting. I guarantee lots of serious converters have no clue whether the scroll in their bits box comes from WHFB or 40K.

 Daia T'Nara wrote:
My innate contrariness wants to launder parts through the chaos daemons range. Use a bunch of Lumineth or whatever parts to convert a daemonette, that's a Sigmar-Sigmar conversion. Use said daemonette in a 40k game, it's now a 40k miniature. Snip parts off it and attach them to another 40k miniature...

I think that's legal by RAW, just don't put a hobbit in it.

 insaniak wrote:
While GW have definitely been moving steadily away from encouraging kitbashes and conversions for a while now, I can actually almost see the logic of this one, given that it is specifically referring to Armies on Parade.

If they're using AoP as a showcase of their game ranges, mixing those ranges confuses things. It's much clearer advertising to only have 40K minis in a 40K promotional space.

That said, I still thing it's a poor choice, and is likely to lead to ill-will when it is invariably badly enforced... Yes, it will be obvious when someone shows up with Space Marines riding flying sharks, but then that guy over there using AoS Orc heads on his Ork boys is going to slip through and the squigs will hit the fan.

I suspect you aren't wrong on either score.
But I see a rise in Thousand Sons armies in AoP with Mutaliths, Tzaangors and Rubrics all standing together just to make a point out of spite. (This also isn't against the rules, as no one is technically 'combining the parts,' though someone could make a really petty argument about tzaangors on Zone Mortalis terrain...)

Its clear that there's some major internal division between systems going on at GW - whether its driven by beancounters; marketing; some kind of massive interdepartmental battle; management directives or some monster of a combination it does lead to some very odd choices.

I get the idea of not having lots of 3rd party stuff; and of having clearmarketing; but at the same time Armies on Parade being this restrictive sounds silly.



I wonder if enough community pushback might cause them to rethink this.




It could also just be that GW knows Old World has a LOT of old sculpts and doesn't want that one game to have a bunch of Armies on Parade full of AoS models before GW can update the Old World at least with modern sculpts (though considering how they've done it the only army REALLY in pressure for this would be Chaos Slaves to Darkness)

 Overread wrote:
Its clear that there's some major internal division between systems going on at GW - whether its driven by beancounters; marketing; some kind of massive interdepartmental battle; management directives or some monster of a combination it does lead to some very odd choices.

I get the idea of not having lots of 3rd party stuff; and of having clearmarketing; but at the same time Armies on Parade being this restrictive sounds silly.



I wonder if enough community pushback might cause them to rethink this.




It could also just be that GW knows Old World has a LOT of old sculpts and doesn't want that one game to have a bunch of Armies on Parade full of AoS models before GW can update the Old World at least with modern sculpts (though considering how they've done it the only army REALLY in pressure for this would be Chaos Slaves to Darkness)

I suspect that might be it, but we've also known for years now that each game is treated independently, with presumably their own budget/sales quotas, so they are in effect competing with one another (also why it's likely they moved a lot of FW/30k stuff to Legends)

I just really hope its a front-end not a back-end thing. Ergo its something management are pushing on customers more than something that really impacts the back end of GW. Cause back-end is how you get disasters that cause companies to implode